Last night, Anne and I got to go to the Jet Propulsion Labratory to watch the landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover. It was a powerful, emotional, inspiring experience. When I think about how these scientists flew something the size of my car to another planet and landed it almost exactly where th...

One of the most frequently asked questions about Tabletop is: "How do I get those awesome brains you used as counters in Zombie Dice?" They were made by our AMAZING art director and prop master, Nick, (who made the show look incredible, and still came in under his budget) out of some kind of fo...

This comes to us from my son, Ryan Wheaton. Click it to embiggen: Click to Embiggen Footnote: If there was any question that love -- not biology -- makes a family, look no further than my son's delightfully twisted sense of humor, which I think I helped foster.

Last week, I got to do one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life: I went to JPL in La Canada to record a video for the landing of Mars Curiosity on August 5. I have to believe that their first through eighth choices weren't available, because it's the only thing that makes sense, but s...

This post made me so happy because I thought I was completely alone in this. Though I always loved reading, doing it as an assignment and finding everything that was hidden in the words never appealed to me. I resented the other students who "got" it. A lot. I have gone back and read some of the books that were assigned during school since, and for the most part, I too had a completely different reaction to them. And now I homeschool my kids and do not want them having those same feeling about the classics as kids, so I don't put any pressure on them - they just read it and let me know what happened and what they thought of the story, and to be perfectly honest, they take much more from the books at their ages than I ever did, and I was a couple of years older than them when I read the same books for the first time. I guess it is all in how it is presented to the student.

I read this great post on John Green's Tumblr, titled Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional: "Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to...